Billie's Kiss Read Online Free PDF Page A

between them in church; and Henry would always make sure to set their one good lamp so its light fell, divided but equal, on Edith’s mending or Billie’s music – while he’d lounge on the floor himself reading, his back against Edith’s chair and a foot braced on the square pilaster leg of Billie’s upright piano. When Billie would pass Henry on the stairs, on her way up with tea for Edith – who was of late sick to her stomach, or sleepy and waxing full – Henry would stoop quickly, his eyes warm, to kiss Billie’s cheek, or once, her ear, his lips catching a few wispy hairs at her temple and setting her whole scalp aprickle.
    Beside the wheelhouse, on the deck of the Gustav Edda , Billie Paxton scraped her loose hair back to look at her new hometown. Her hair pushed heavily against her cocked arms and flickered around them. She caught the two uniformed youths staring at her. They appeared to consult, to egg each other on, then they came over. The boys removed their caps, but the strong wind was only able to set up a telegraphic quiver in their cropped hair. One spoke, the other merely gazed. The one who spoke had slightly protuberant pale blue eyes, but was otherwise good-looking. He was perhaps fifteen years of age. He introduced himself – Rixon Hallow, and this was his friend Elov Jansen. He said he hoped Mrs Maslen was comfortable in her cabin. Billie nodded, speechless. She felt the wind poke a cold finger through a split seam underher arm. The boy blushed. He was waiting for something. Billie realised that, as it was this party who’d given up their cabin to the Maslens when they arrived unexpected at Luag, they might expect her to acknowledge it. These boys had been obliged to walk the deck for the ten hours of the voyage. Surprised into it – and despite herself – Billie dropped into a jerky, curtailed curtsey; she bobbed, as she’d used to do to her employers when she was briefly in service. She resented this, that she’d been reminded to show gratitude, found ungrateful, or hesitant – again.
    â€˜Mr Hesketh says he’ll send your shawl on to you once it has been laundered,’ said Rixon Hallow. He was still blushing.
    â€˜Thank you.’ Billie excused herself, said she must go help her sister get dressed.
    The engines had slowed. The ship was making not for the deep, sheltered water within the harbour proper, but for a berth at the sea side of the longest pier. Billie saw that the pier had been constructed as a causeway to a much older castle, a small fortress really, on what must once have been an island of rock. Nearer to, the fortress showed dilapidated, its lower walls thick with salt scum, its unglazed windows protected by bars in the form of rusty iron arrowheads.
    Billie walked between the boys before they had replaced their caps. She ducked her head and darted around the wheelhouse , watched only her step, her hand on the rope rail along the wheelhouse wall. The sea was quiet enough now for her to hear the ash smuts from the ship’s smokestack drop hissing into the waves. She glanced toward the sound and saw the water, clear and almost grass green over stretches of sand between rocks maybe thirty feet down. The sea turned grey again over the rocks, but green was the true colour of its dense transparency. The ship was backing its propellers and Billie saw wind-pushed wavelets crisscrossed by smaller wrinkles, water disturbed by the engine, the cross-hatching a border between natural wind-driven, and unnatural,submarine turbulence. Perhaps because of its colour, or its texture – this novel sign of engine’s muscle moving water’s weight – the sea suddenly seemed strange to Billie, as it hadn’t since she was a small child.
    Henry met her at the hatch. He said he’d been sent to fetch her. Edith had told him Billie had the buttonhook. Then he said, ‘Look at our new home.’
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